A few months ago, Casual Creations was only a concept. The client loves to bake and thought that making desserts for small gatherings, such as bridge clubs, parties, reunions, etc., would be an enjoyable way to share her love of baking while earning extra income. I was tasked with developing a name and tag line, creating a visual identity, and creating marketing materials.

There were two main challenges when working on this project.

1. The name and tag line. We needed to convey the idea of homemade desserts that might not be picture-perfect, but that still tasted delicious. After much brainstorming, “Casual Creations: Desserts like grandma made,” came to the forefront.
2. Reconciling my own design ideas with the real world. I originally envisioned a beautiful, stylized illustration of a lemon pie, using only white on a rich, lemon-yellow background. Unfortunately, if the yellow is dark enough to read white text, it no longer looks lemony. While struggling with this concept, Debbie, my client, received a beautiful red Sunbeam mixer for her birthday, providing a focal point for the solution.

In the end, I was able to create a brand that evokes grandma and her kitchen. We determined that, instead of letterhead and envelopes, a price sheet and dessert labels were more important for this business. For the website, we continued the idea of grandma’s kitchen by not only making an “online business card” but also making it a place for Debbie to share other recipes with her customers.

Update: Sometimes it’s just as exciting to see what the client does with the finished product. Debbie told me several months later that she punches holes in her price sheets and dessert labels and ties them together with a red-and-white-checkered bow that matches the ribbon she ties her desserts up with. A perfect touch to the brand. Way to go, Debbie.

When budgets are tight, businesses try to cut expenses any way possible. This often means looking for “affordable” design solutions. Although crowdsourcing your logo may seem like a good way to save money, there are some reasons you should avoid this route.

The most obvious reason is amateur results. Sure, you’ll probably get at least one logo you like. And it might even look pretty good to grandma. But in the end, it would be a surprise if an experienced and trained designer actually took part. (Crowdsourcing looks a lot like “Spec” work to them.) This leaves you with something that might look okay, but doesn’t have the thought and research put into it to create a lasting mark.

There’s another reason to avoid the crowdsourcing route that you may not be aware of. The individuals that enter these contests are usually entering lots of other contests at the same time. The goal is to win as often and as “efficiently” as possible. To keep up the pace, they submit very similar logos to many different businesses, meaning your logo may not be nearly as original as you think.

Even worse, there’s always they chance you could get in legal trouble. Sadly, there have been several instances of individuals submitting art they have no permission to use. Sometimes they are misusing art they could legally use for other types of projects. Other times, they are actually stealing the art from another company. When you choose your favorite logo, you have no idea whether you truly have a legal right to use it or not.

Although hiring a respected designer to create your logo might cost more, you can be certain it is unique, targeted, and legal.

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Nate Voss has written an excellent post about this topic.

I recently designed a logo for Code4Lib, a community of library software developers and technologists.

As with every design project, I started out by identifying the needs and desires of the client.

• There should be an understandable connection between the logo and the organization, not just a random mark.
• Code4Lib is no longer just an online community. They have a professional journal, annual conference, and many other activities. The logo needed to be flexible so all the aspects could be brought together under one brand.
• Many members of Code4Lib are committed to open source, so this needed to be reflected as much as possible.

Code4Lib is run by consensus. They vote on everything. All the members of Code4Lib worked together to create guidelines for what they wanted/needed. Fortunately for me, volunteers then formed a committee to actually shepherd the project through to completion. Although all members expressed their opinions at different stages, the logo committee distilled everything to something reasonable to communicate.

I started out with several different logo ideas. Some went in more of a coding direction while others went in a library direction. After a great deal of back and forth over various ideas, the logo above was decided on. The serif font harkens back to printed books, while the brackets relate to the coding aspects.

Logos for other aspects of the Code4Lib community use the base logo, with the name of that activity incorporated into it. I designed a few derivative logos and figured out the appropriate font size, letter spacing, etc.

Because of the commitment to open source I tried to make the logo as “free” as possible. The main Code4Lib logo was created using the free font Centabel Book. I tried very hard to use a free font for the “activity” name as well, but could not find one that fit well. Although many programmers dislike Microsoft, I used a Microsoft font, which has the benefit of being available to a great number of people.

I also released the logo under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This allows the logo to be used by anyone for any purpose.

The saying goes that, “Design by Committee,” is hell, but that was clearly not the case. The committee was very knowledgeable, and the community as a whole was very receptive. It was a pleasure to work with the Code4Lib community to design their new logo.